GeneralThis forum is for non-technical general discussion which can include both Linux and non-Linux topics. Have fun!

Notices

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.

You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!

Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.

If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.

Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.

Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

I've found systemd on every Linux installation I've tried to be absolutely rock-solid. It takes so much out of the hassle out of administering Linux and I liken systemd to a car going from carburetors to electronic fuel injection--it's much more abstract, less "mechanical", puts a single unified system (the ECU in the car's case) in charge of the whole engine, and less customizable, but it Just Works, and it works without fussing with it. Two (very short) console commands was all it took to set up bluetooth on my ThinkPad after migrating from Ubuntu to Arch.

LATE EDIT: Another thing to consider is how much of Linux's future is tied up in embedded systems, the "Internet of Things", and even cars. Things that need to function as computers without any sysadmin to feed and them and burp them and change their diapers. If a software update or repair job to your car breaks the One True Configuration of shell scripts, then that's a trip to the dealer (forget your mechanic) that will cost the owner hundreds of dollars.

And furthermore, if systemd is mysterious to you, download the source and read it. It's capital-F capital-S Free Software. Read it. Hack on it. Write a better systemd if you want. That's a feature systemd has that the much-maligned svchost it's often compared to does not.

I've found systemd on every Linux installation I've tried to be absolutely rock-solid.

Whereas others have found it to be buggy, complicated, problematic and much too "black box".

A search for "systemd" on forums.debian.net alone yields over 9000 matches, more than 2/3 of which occur after the stable "jessie" release in 2015.

Only just over 1300 matches for sysvinit, which had been part of Debian from the start and of course default init since the site opened in 2004 to the jessie release in 2015... so over roughly 11 years, sysvinit gets mentioned around 120 times per year on average.

By contrast in just under 4 years, systemd is getting mentioned, on average, around 2300 times per year.

Bearing in mind that the vast majority of threads posted on that site are "problems"...

It's undeniable that there are a lot of problems with systemd, just as there are a lot of problems with MS Windows.

Speaking of which - if this were Windows, creating this many problems, some would be in this thread dismissing it as "micro$hit" or whatever, or blaming it for being "closed source"...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Woolie Wool

It takes so much out of the hassle out of administering Linux

Perhaps it does for you, however it does not for others who were used to "administering Linux" they way they'd been administering it for decades.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Woolie Wool

and I liken systemd to a car going from carburetors to electronic fuel injection--it's much more abstract, less "mechanical", puts a single unified system (the ECU in the car's case) in charge of the whole engine, and less customizable, but it Just Works, and it works without fussing with it. Two (very short) console commands was all it took to set up bluetooth on my ThinkPad after migrating from Ubuntu to Arch.

Perhaps a good example of one of the glaring problems with systemd... and here's why:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Woolie Wool

If a software update or repair job to your car breaks the One True Configuration of shell scripts, then that's a trip to the dealer (forget your mechanic) that will cost the owner hundreds of dollars.

Yes, cars have gone beyond being serviceable by the driver...

Red Hat, the corporation funding systemd development and the first to introduce it in it's enterprise products, sells support contracts for a living...

Dude, you can find horror stories for [/i]anything[/i], and they'll always be the most numerous because people who use systemd and have no problems with it don't write rave stories about systemd because in day-to-day usage they don't even notice it. Nearly all major distros now use it, and the sky never fell, just as it didn't fall when people mass-adopted X, modern browsers, and other "bloated" programs. There are millions upon millions upon millions of Linux boxes with systemd invisibly ticking away in the background, always-on servers with systemd processing untold millions of requests every day.

Quote:

Originally Posted by cynwulf

Speaking of which - if this were Windows, creating this many problems, some would be in this thread dismissing it as "micro$hit" or whatever, or blaming it for being "closed source"...

If Windows created "this many" problems, it would be considered an absolute revelation compared to the usual Windows standard.

Quote:

Perhaps it does for you, however it does not for others who were used to "administering Linux" they way they'd been administering it for decades.

A lot of Windows users lamented that their AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS wizardry lost its mojo when 2000 and XP came around and ripped out Windows' own form of init scripts. Too bad for them, and too bad for you, too. Systems change, and old people who refuse to change their old habits will be left behind. If you think getting GNOME to work without systemd is a pain, just wait until other programs start using using systemd APIs and more systemd plugin daemons are rolled out.

Quote:

Yes, cars have gone beyond being serviceable by the driver...

Because cars that are "serviceable by the driver" do not meet the needs of most drivers, nor the regulatory agencies that govern the manufacture and sale of cars. At least Linux boxes don't kill enough people to have to worry about the latter.

Quote:

Red Hat, the corporation funding systemd development and the first to introduce it in it's enterprise products, sells support contracts for a living...

Pretty sure Red Hat support contracts don't come with my Arch or Xubuntu installations. As for scary corporations, their funding (and from much scarier sources than Red Hat--IBM of all people is one of the biggest sources of Linux's funding, who would have imagined such a thing in 1988 when they were trying to lock down the whole PC market?) is everywhere in the Linux world, and the more popular Linux gets, the more of it there will be. We live in a pay-to-play society, and unless we go full communist tomorrow, it's going to stay that way in the foreseeable future. That's the price for having an OS with broad hardware support and everyday accessibility.

Furthermore, Red Hat initially didn't want it, and wanted to stay with sysvinit, Lennart Poettering wrote it on his own time and only when Red Hat saw the prototype were they interested.

Quote:

Or... use what used to work perfectly for decades?

It worked perfectly for old Unix grognards, but old Unix grognards are becoming irrelevant, as is the entire Unix platform outside of Linux and MacOS (and MacOS, of course, has launchd, which systemd draws much influence from). It was an old solution designed for an old world of simpler, mostly stand-alone computers maintained by expert sysadmins and gradually hacked up into a convoluted mess that varied greatly from distro to distro, and didn't play that nicely with forests of USB port dongles that can be connected and disconnected at will, constant mounting/unmounting (which most users want done automatically every time), ubiquitous massive networking, home users (remember in 1983 a home computer was a toy like a TRS-80, not anything we would understand as a "real computer") and other things System V's authors never considered or could consider.

If systemd makes interoperability with Solaris or BSD more difficult, there are not enough Solaris or BSD users for the people with power in Linux development to care.

Quote:

The svchost comparison is not even worth bringing up, because it is not a viable comparison.

It is, because svchost does a lot of the things systemd does, just much more crudely because it was designed by committee 30 years ago.

A lot of Windows users lamented that their AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS wizardry lost its mojo when 2000 and XP came around and ripped out Windows' own form of init scripts.

However, that was never "Windows' own form of init scripts". autoexec.bat and config.sys could be very roughly compared to something like rc.local, or it's equivalent and a module loader config file, in any given UNIX system...

(p.s. they're still there - and they became largely irrelevant long before 2000/XP)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Woolie Wool

Because cars that are "serviceable by the driver" do not meet the needs of most drivers, nor the regulatory agencies that govern the manufacture and sale of cars. At least Linux boxes don't kill enough people to have to worry about the latter.

You've perhaps missed the point. You've posted a rather flawed automobile analogy and I've simply turned it around to present it from a different angle. The "black box" nature of a fuel injection system or ABS, to name but two examples, keeps technicians in a job, ensuring a flow of spare parts, which can only be fitted by specialists and prevents the driver from conducting their own simple repairs, as they did for years - at the same time of course it "gives drivers what they want", two sides to the coin. Planned obsolescence is also a big part of it. In essence, it is of course all built with failure in mind, but even more so, built to fail.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Woolie Wool

It worked perfectly for old Unix grognards[etc]

It worked perfectly well for everyone who still managed to use Linux from the early 90's up until the middle of this decade - no amount of zealous systemd advocacy can erase that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Woolie Wool

It is, because svchost does a lot of the things systemd does, just much more crudely because it was designed by committee 30 years ago.

svchost is a super server such as inetd, systemd is an init system, service manager and more...

You've perhaps missed the point. You've posted a rather flawed automobile analogy and I've simply turned it around to present it from a different angle. The "black box" nature of a fuel injection system or ABS, to name but two examples, keeps technicians in a job, ensuring a flow of spare parts, which can only be fitted by specialists and prevents the driver from conducting their own simple repairs, as they did for years - at the same time of course it "gives drivers what they want", two sides to the coin. Planned obsolescence is also a big part of it. In essence, it is of course all built with failure in mind, but even more so, built to fail.

I remember reading a novel in which an electromagnetic radiation burst caused by a high-level nuclear bomb fried all the electricity infrastructure in America. Among other disasters, all the cars stopped for good, except for a few old bangers belonging to enthusiasts which still had gearboxes and carburettors.

Comparing the number of Win-D'ohs complaints vs. Linux complaints is like comparing car complaints from the local granny senior sewing circle to car complaints from the tuner's racing forum- applers and oranges.

The average Win-D'ohs user has a problem, he takes his 'puter to the local 'puter guru; or goes to Walmart and buys a new one for $149; the typical Linux user....first thing, posts on a forum to find a solution and fixes it himself. Two very different beasts.

Also, the typical Win-D'ohs user is used to things not working; problems; bugs; etc. so they are more likely to live with a problem and just keep quiet- whereas most Linux users expect their machines to do what they want them to do, when they want them to do it, and will balk if anything's not perfect- because, after all, that is the reason many of us are here: We expect things to work, and won't tolerate all the BS inherent in MS products.

However, that was never "Windows' own form of init scripts". autoexec.bat and config.sys could be very roughly compared to something like rc.local, or it's equivalent and a module loader config file, in any given UNIX system...

(p.s. they're still there - and they became largely irrelevant long before 2000/XP)

Systemd also has init script compatibility...but makes those init scripts irrelevant. And if you thought AUTOEXEC.BAT was irrelevant "long before", then you've never had the (mis)fortune of trying to get legacy MS-DOS applications to play nice with Windows 95. I have. I've dug around Win9x's AUTOEXEC.BAT a lot.

Quote:

You've perhaps missed the point. You've posted a rather flawed automobile analogy and I've simply turned it around to present it from a different angle. The "black box" nature of a fuel injection system or ABS, to name but two examples, keeps technicians in a job, ensuring a flow of spare parts, which can only be fitted by specialists and prevents the driver from conducting their own simple repairs, as they did for years - at the same time of course it "gives drivers what they want", two sides to the coin. Planned obsolescence is also a big part of it. In essence, it is of course all built with failure in mind, but even more so, built to fail.

Well to turn the car analogy back on you, imagine if your ECU was open-source and anyone could read it or make modifications if they bothered to learn the language and study the codebase. systemd is a black box to those who don't know how to read C. Which is a lot of people, but that lot of people are probably better off leaving the dirty bits to systemd anyway or learning to program. SYSTEMD IS NOT A BLACK BOX. It is an open architecture--it is better than your car's ECU.

Quote:

It worked perfectly well for everyone who still managed to use Linux from the early 90's up until the middle of this decade - no amount of zealous systemd advocacy can erase that.

So a period of time where the Linux userbase was much smaller and more restricted. Now Linux has to serve many more masters.

Quote:

svchost is a super server such as inetd, systemd is an init system, service manager and more...

systemd's biggest thing was automatically starting, stopping, and managing daemons (services in Windows speak, hence svchost) without user intervention or scripting...which is what svchost has always done, and by virtue of doing it first and Windows NT's heroic (and not necessarily in a good way) efforts at backwards compatibility, does it worst.

Again, I think a lot of systemd hate comes from old admins who find their skills devalued and their jobs jeopardized by the new way of doing things, and the lower skill level required for, and greater interchangeability of (no One True Configuration) professional admins on a systemd distro. Which is good for basically everyone except old hackers. Normally I would feel sympathy for skilled labor who are about to be de-skilled, but because hackers and sysadmins have spent decades thinking they're superior to normal people and destined to change the world, that "meritocracy" is a thing, and that their fate is not bound to the rest of the working class, seeing them about to be knocked down a peg (and an income bracket) feels more like justice.

Comparing the number of Win-D'ohs complaints vs. Linux complaints is like comparing car complaints from the local granny senior sewing circle to car complaints from the tuner's racing forum- applers and oranges.

The average Win-D'ohs user has a problem, he takes his 'puter to the local 'puter guru; or goes to Walmart and buys a new one for $149; the typical Linux user....first thing, posts on a forum to find a solution and fixes it himself. Two very different beasts.

Also, the typical Win-D'ohs user is used to things not working; problems; bugs; etc. so they are more likely to live with a problem and just keep quiet- whereas most Linux users expect their machines to do what they want them to do, when they want them to do it, and will balk if anything's not perfect- because, after all, that is the reason many of us are here: We expect things to work, and won't tolerate all the BS inherent in MS products.

Very well put, thank you! One other added note: Microsoft flooded the market with PCs bundled with Windows which is another reason people just "accept it". They don't know anything else and feel the bugs, flaws, idiosyncrasies, are just normal behavior. Linux has its share of warts but from a usability standpoint, most of the DE's and even some window managers run circles around Windows in terms of usability.

Have to say I know a few "Linux curious" Windows Gamers -- if they could escape the Windows woes they likely would. Not that I think Linux should focus on gaming but the Steam OS changes are definately getting the more "technical " windows gamers taking notice.
Perhaps I'm imagining it but I am sure, not that long ago, that a Windows gamr would say "Linux? What's that?" Whereas, now, Linux is know to most people who are "into computers".

Again, I think a lot of systemd hate comes from old admins who find their skills devalued and their jobs jeopardized by the new way of doing things...

Actually in many cases the "hate" is actually "fear" of the way systemd is all but impossible to replace because of the way it's a constantly moving target - if it did just one thing (or even one well defined set of things) then an alternative COULD be installed without having to redo the entire distro (eg Devuan).

To get back on topic, it's becoming too windows like because from what I've seen it requires too much guessing "what are they going to do next?"